Poetry's Power Against Intolerance, by Seamus Heaney

August 26, 2001, Sunday

Poetry's Power Against Intolerance

By Seamus Heaney

Some lines from a poem called ''Incantation,'' by the Lithuanian poet
Czeslaw Milosz, express the fundamental beliefs upon which the fight against
racism must be based:

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.

No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,

No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.

It puts what should be above things as they are.

It does not know Jew from Greek nor slave from master.

It is thrilling to hear the ideal possibilities of human life stated so
unambiguously and unrepentantly. For a moment, the dirty slate of history seems
to have been wiped clean. The lines return us to the bliss of beginnings. They
tempt us to credit all over again liberations promised by the Enlightenment and
harmonies envisaged by the scholastics, to believe that the deep well of
religious and humanist value may still be unpolluted.

And yet there is also something problematic about what is being said. While
the lines do have original force, the evidence of the ages is stacked against
them. So it comes as no surprise to be told that in the original Polish, there
is a certain frantic, even comic pitch to the meter and tone of ''Incantation.''
Mr. Milosz's irony saves him and his poem from illusion and sentimentality; the
tragic understanding that coexists with the apparent innocence of his claims
only makes those claims all the more unyielding and indispensable.

In the course of the past century, imaginative writers have grown more and
more conscious of the darker levels to which human beings can descend, yet their
art remains answerable to ''what should be'' as well as to ''things as they
are.'' And this means, I believe, that the example of writers has something to
say to all who campaign against racism at the present time. Activists have
different priorities than artists do, but they, too, are forced to acknowledge
the prevalence of the atrocious while maintaining faith in the possibility of
the desired. As the United Nations Conference Against Racism meets this week in
Durban, South Africa, perhaps the artist's voice can contribute to the dialogues
of activists.

Such campaigners would be in total sympathy with another famous utterance by
Mr. Milosz. ''What is poetry,'' he asks, ''which does not save nations and
peoples?'' It is a question that concerns the redress of poetry, by which I mean
the need poets feel to align themselves with those who have been wronged, to
repair and compensate for injustices suffered, to stay mindful of the miseries
of the world. It is the serious artist's question to himself and the question he
will usually hear when he comes in contact with the activist. And it is a
question he will answer by posing another one: What is poetry that does not
address itself to the individual consciousness, that does not convey an
experience of verification at the personal level?

The fight against racism certainly must be waged by governments, as a highly
organized, internationally coordinated, deliberately pursued effort of education
and legislation. Nations and peoples must be recognized and represented equally,
must be saved by just laws and civilized treatment, by actions. Nevertheless,
the fight is also helped by every statement that strengthens an individual's
moral sense and gratifies his or her sense of right, every utterance that
reawakens the feeling of personal dignity or promotes a trust in human
solidarity.

Much of the literature of the past century is a de profundis on behalf of the
desperate and the deprived in gulag or ghetto or township or camp, but in spite
of its desolate content that literature has been a positive influence: it has
had the paradoxical effect of raising spirits and creating hope. We need only
think of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to remind ourselves how the integrity of an
individual writer can underwrite a whole culture of resolution and resistance.
It can even underwrite a new idiom of affirmation, like the one employed in the
United Nations declaration ''Tolerance and Diversity: A Vision for the 21st
Century.''

The document is direct: ''The horrors of racism -- from slavery to holocaust
to apartheid to ethnic cleansing -- have deeply wounded the victim and debased
the perpetrator. These horrors are still with us in various forms. It is now
time to confront them and to take comprehensive measures against them.'' The
document further declares that ''we all constitute one human family'' and
asserts a new scientific basis for this belief by invoking the proof afforded by
the mapping of the human genome. Yet the scientific reinforcement of the
argument remains just that: reinforcement. Its primary strength comes from moral
and philosophical sources, from the witness of heroic individuals to the belief
that human reason is indeed beautiful and invincible.

When we see the signature of Nelson Mandela at the bottom of the declaration,
it immediately acquires a kind of moral specific gravity, for the name Mandela,
like the name Solzhenitsyn, is the equivalent of a gold reserve, a guarantee
that the currency of good speech can be backed up by heroic action. There is
nothing loose-mouthed involved. When Mr. Mandela's writing rises to a noble
statement, that statement has been earned. It has behind it the full weight of a
life endured for the sake of the principles it affirms.

Consequently, there is genuine healing power rather than mere rhetorical
uplift in Mr. Mandela's espousal of the aims of the Durban conference, and the
conference could well adopt as its sacred text something he wrote in his book,
''Long Walk to Freedom'': ''It was during those long and lonely years that my
hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all
people, black and white. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor
must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. I am not truly free if I am
taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my
freedom is taken away from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed
of their humanity.''

These lines, like those from ''Incantation,'' have a radiance that is only
enhanced by the tragic knowledge behind them, including the knowledge of how the
oppressor is not free. With such personal, individual empathy, Mr. Mandela shows
himself to be an artist of human possibility. He might well be called an
activist, but he has a visionary understanding and would surely agree with the
conviction that sustains Mr. Milosz's poem. It, too, could be adopted as a text
by all who travel to Durban. For there is nothing improbable about the poem's
luminous conclusion: